I thought I would post this as something of a guide for anybody asking the question: "can I get FreeviewHD?".

So to recap from my last post describing the Hauppauge Nova-T-Stick:

Things I tried/found:

a) Don’t be "smart" and download the latest driver from Hauppauge - use the one on the CD that's included in the box. I "prepared" my PC before picking up the T-Stick and although the drivers seemed to work fine (recognized h/w etc) I could not get a signal. After some frustration I rolled XP back and installed the CD drivers - and voila all good!

b) Due to situation above I took the setup into work, which is in the city, a block from the Skytower. Using the little aerial supplied and ScanChannelsBDA.exe I measured an average signal quality of 96% (min: 80%, max: 100%). Moving the aerial from vertical to horizontal slowly, caused the graph (displayed by ScanChannelsBDA) to reduce and vice-versa. This then supports my idea of using this setup to "point" an aerial. Also if you live in the city, from this I would say that the supplied aerial would possibly be all you need.

c) Back at home 8.93km from Skytower (as determined by Google Earth!) I decided to repeat above but this time plugged into my UHF/VHF combo aerial pointed at Waiatarua. In this config I received Waiatarua at 20% quality (not bad considering my Prime reception is rubbish) and quite surprisingly Skytower came in at 60% - with the aerial pointing ~90 degrees the wrong way!.

d) I then loaded on GBPVR and after scanning for all channels (it found 22) and downloading the EPG via DVB (cause I could), I tried to watch LiveTV. Assuming my reception was still at ~60% quality, this produced images as if looking at a slideshow. I reckon that's not bad, as 60% Q makes for an extremely poor Bit Error Rate.

e) Next thing to try: Hop on to the roof with laptop and spanner and turn the aerial to the Skytower and see what I get (thereby killing VHF analogue reception in our household!!).

Conclusion: - DTT reception is not as problematic as I thought it was going to be (although I still aren't at the point of watchable TV). - If you have a laptop, the T-Stick is a cheap way to give DTT a try.

Today I carried out e). That is, measured my reception from a combo aerial with a laptop on the roof.

i) As I was aiming for Skytower DTT the first thing needing to be done was to turn the aerial to vertical polarisation. Following this I received the following:

- 530MHz

- 562MHz

- 626MHz

Interestingly 626MHz appears to be moving above the systems tuning "sweet-spot" as can be seen with by the Q dropoff. This definitely encourages me to buy a dedicated UHF aerial for DTT, as the combo aerial can be seen to be compromised (surmised).

I was also interested to see the effect aerial polarity had on Q, so I measured the 530MHz signal again, with the aerial in the horizontal plane:

Clearly aligning for the correct polarity is critical!

The next thing I need to try, is to get something watchable with all this fiddling around! At least I now know I will have no trouble with DTT reception!

I made a 10 minute recording of TV3 (687MB) with GBPVR while I was setup on the roof. My laptop recorded this ok, but had no show of playing these recordings back. Interestingly LiveTV did play ok on the laptop - not sure how that works, does GBPVR downscale LiveTV?

To quickly test the integrity of the recording I transferred it to my P4 (2.6GHz) PC and downloaded/installed a trial of PowerDVD8 ( http://download.cyberlink.com/ftpdload/trial/PowerDVD_Trial.exe ), this ran, but was at 100% CPU utilisation. PDVD8 reported the playback as:

Video: MPEG - 4 AVC 9.66 MbpsAudio: AAC 2.0 112kbps

As all the recent FreeviewHD posts describe, without Video h/w acceleration my PC was struggling! Time to build a new PC with the appropriate video card (GF8600) I guess.

Reanalyse: Did you have any special issues with installing GB-PVR with the NOVA-T Stick - what device did you choose ?

When I try and install GB-PVR gets so far then rolls back, and when I run the fiiles directly I can not see any channels and GB-PVR does not detect the NOVA-T stick.

Proably because i am usning Vista :-(

GB-PVR works perfectly under Vista. I also haven't used one of the Nova T sticks but know quite a few people who have done with no dramas.

If GB-PVR is rolling back to the install it means there is some sort of error somewhere. Have you ensured that you install the Microsoft Runtime beforehand? If all else fails delete the entire GB-PVR directory and start again.

Reanalyse: Did you have any special issues with installing GB-PVR with the NOVA-T Stick - what device did you choose ?

When I try and install GB-PVR gets so far then rolls back, and when I run the fiiles directly I can not see any channels and GB-PVR does not detect the NOVA-T stick.

Proably because i am usning Vista :-(

I had to turn the User Account Control (UAC) off in Vista32 as it was preventing software installing properly even with administrator rights. Good old MS going the extra mile to protect us from ourselves.:-)

If not here's some probably obvious advice: Go back a couple of steps - did the Nova-T Stick drivers load correctly? If yes did you run ScanChannelsBDA.exe or ScanChannelsBDA_UK.exe? This runs under a DOS window so as long as the drivers are loaded correctly should be as "OS independent" as you're going to get.

Also to answer - in GBPVR I selected Nova T Stick as the device, no issue...it was simply in the list.

Got it basically working by directly running the config.exe, obtained the EPG but when I tried to watch nothing appeared.Still having trouble installing in Vista, even with UAC off, installation completes then rolls back.Will try installing as an XP application, I believe this can be done

Twitter »

Follow us to receive Twitter updates when new discussions are posted in our forums: